Disintegration: A Mystery Thriller Read online

  The mountains were thick and bright green with new growth and a late spring rain had washed the dust from the streets. Kingsboro had only two cab companies, each of those operated by solitary drivers who kept their own hours. Jacob could have called Donald, or any one of half a dozen friends and business associates, but the walk seemed a worthwhile challenge after the weeks spent in the hospital bed. Besides, a borrowed ride might corner him into conversation.

  The talk would go to banal matters such as whether the Atlanta Braves would finally do it this year or how the late snows had affected the golf course at the country club. Anything except what Renee had called “the eighty-ton elephant in the living room.” Jacob’s loss. Or plural losses, depending on how deep into personal history the friend was willing to go. He never wanted to hear the words “I’m sorry” again.

  The burns had healed better than he deserved. The skin was still a little shiny and tight, but with no permanent scarring. Dr. Masutu said he was lucky. If the house hadn’t collapsed and spat him out when it did, the carbon monoxide might have finished him off. The doctor had tried to convince him that his daughter had been doomed no matter what Jacob had done, but Jacob didn’t believe it.

  He’d originally considered going by the office, sitting behind his desk and seeing if M & W Ventures still held any appeal at all. But there were too many reminders, too many photographs. His desk was just another piece of a broken past. He headed down the sidewalk, away from downtown. He had no more destinations, only a long journey away from places he had known.

  On the eastern side of town, Kingsboro was a schizophrenic mix of land uses. Medical offices were clustered around the hospital like brick vultures around carrion, while some old farmhouses sat back from the road behind them, their gardens showing the first green shoots of corn and potatoes. A nearby gas station had pumps that didn’t accept credit cards and its lot was a black crumble of concrete, yet a glossy sign heralded the modern British energy conglomerate that had taken over. A row of faded apartments slewed up a slight rise of earth beyond the hospital, some of the windows held together with masking tape. Soaring above those flat rooftops was a glistening, seven-story Holiday Inn.

  His father had built the Holiday Inn. It was Warren Wells’ last attempt at an Appalachian Tower of Babel before his death. Jacob averted his eyes from the inn, the tallest building on the landscape. But his father touched something on every horizon, from the community arts center along the highway to the recreation fields in the plains along the river that bore the Wells name. Warren Wells had built too much of this town, his civic stench lingering in a hundred corridors. Jacob had succumbed to the allure of following in those loud footsteps.

  Being born here was enough of a mistake, and being born who he was made it even worse. But he’d compounded it by returning. He had once thought his escape was complete. Then along came Renee with her drive for him to succeed, and she pushed him to the only territory where victories mattered, where his accomplishments had a measuring stick. Victory from the ground up.

  Now Kingsboro was where he buried his dead.

  After a mile, the sidewalk ended and he walked along the clumped grass that edged the road. His breath was hard and cold and his heart beat too rapidly, but he forced his feet forward. Cars roared past, pickup trucks loaded with lumber and sewer pipes, soccer dads in SUV’s, little old ladies on their way to the hairdresser, cable television techs in their long vans. Something purred in Jacob’s jacket pocket. He stuck his hand in the pocket, pulled out the cell phone, and stared at it as if it were an alien artifact. Renee must have brought the jacket to the hospital, the phone planted as a ploy to bring him back around to his old self.

  Jacob the developer, the builder, the one who carried the bloodline. Jacob the upstanding citizen and loving husband. Jacob, father of two—

  He turned and hurled the phone as far as he could, wrenching his shoulder with the effort. The small, silver rectangle spun end over end, disappearing into a tall thicket of briars and scrub hemlock. A warped wall made of wooden slats marked the edge of a mobile home park behind the weeds. A hand-painted sign in English and Spanish offered weekly rentals, cash only. Crumpled beer cans and cellophane food wrappers clung to the weeds. This place was in dire need of a bulldozer, a cosmic clean sweep.

  He walked on, the traffic thinning, his head throbbing under the midmorning sun. The birds had started their journey north, and species the likes of which he’d rarely seen passed overhead or twittered from pine branches. The land gave way to clusters of small houses, old but neatly kept, owned by people whose ancestors had bartered away the property that had made outsiders wealthy. Jacob was tired and his legs weak from lack of use, but he kept moving in a pitiful yearning for escape.

  But he knew that, no matter how fast or how far he fled, he couldn’t outrun himself.

  A car came growling up behind him, slowed, passed. He glanced at its dented green flanks and immediately assigned its driver to the lower class. It was a 1970s family car, a gas-swigging chunk of Chevrolet steel that only a rural American could drive without shame. The windows were tinted so he couldn’t match a face to such a metal monstrosity.

  The car slowed again, its brake lights blinking twenty feet ahead of Jacob. The car idled in a throaty rasp of rusted muffler. Jacob kept walking. He moved past the car, looking up the road, wondering where all the traffic had gone. Even along this residential stretch beyond the town limits, there were too few roads to avoid a steady stream of vehicles.

  The Chevy’s engine accelerated and its exhaust hung on the damp air. The car eased up alongside Jacob again, and sweat crept beneath his eyes and scalp line. He glanced toward the car, not turning his head, and saw only his own reflection in the tinted passenger window. The car kept pace with Jacob, and he fought the urge to break into a run.

  Maybe this was a robbery set-up. The crime rate was low in Kingsboro, but people were people everywhere and occasionally someone grew desperate. Jacob was dressed in a tailor-cut suit, not the kind of person usually seen on the side of a road. He was out of his element, in a place he didn’t belong, pale and trembling due to his long recovery. The predators of every species had a knack for culling the weak, picking out the perfect victims.

  He walked faster, eyes shifting over to the Chevy. Its engine was the only sound in that tight stretch of valley. Even the birds had vanished. The road curved out of sight in both directions, behind hills turning green with spring. The trailer park was around the bend in its own clutter. One lone farmhouse was visible in a carved pocket of the woods, but it appeared uninhabited, shutters drawn and driveway empty, the doors of its adjacent barn bolted and locked. A hand-painted “For Sale” sign was staked in the scraggly yard.

  The car scooted ahead, then paused and idled until he caught up to it.

  If only he had the cell phone. Even if he called for help, though, what would he tell the police? He was being stalked by a car? They couldn’t arrive in time to help him anyway. He could leave the side of the road, cut over the ditch, and head between the trees. But the car had issued no overt threat, the driver holding a steady course, not veering from between the lines. The only menace was in its slow crawl, though its motor grumbled in an imagined hunger.

  A robber, that’s all. Nothing worse.

  Jacob increased his pace to just short of a jog. Still the car remained alongside him. He didn’t have a watch, but the car must have followed him for at least thirty seconds. Surely another car would have come by during that time. It was as if the road had been blocked off at each end of the mountain valley so this showdown could be staged in private.

  His lungs were taut and aching, his legs about to collapse and fold. He was too out of shape. Even if he ran, the driver would have no trouble chasing him down. Fighting was out of the question. How do you fight four tons of blind steel?

  You know it’s him.

  Maybe someone was only trying to scare him. Some of his business competitors accused him of dirty tricks,
such as planting money among members of the county planning board whenever he had a variance request coming up. He’d had disputes with a few contractors, and a couple of times he had refused to pay when work wasn’t done to specifications. He had an inside track on property that had been foreclosed through mortgage defaults or tax liens, and his deals had put more than one family out on the street, though they always had it coming. Was it his fault that some people didn’t pay their bills on time?

  Just being a Wells was plenty enough reason to be a target. These mountain people had long memories, and Warren Wells had shafted a dozen men. In some cases, he’d also shafted their wives, in a crueler but less economically damaging way. Jacob had inherited miles of built-up resentment along with the numerous tracts of commercial property.

  The driver of the green car could be anybody. Someone he knew in high school? Or someone who knew Joshua? Some people still confused him with his brother, and Joshua had made plenty of enemies. Joshua, though, had been smart enough to leave town and never look back.

  It’s anybody. Not him.

  Jacob’s legs refused his command for them to move faster, and he could hardly muster the energy for another step. So he stopped, bent over slightly to catch his breath, and turned to the passenger side of the car. He reached out as if to open the door.

  The Chevrolet groaned, its engine racing, and the rear wheels spun on the asphalt. The warm smell of rubber and burnt oil assaulted Jacob’s nose. The car rocketed away, its tires screaming and the rear end fishtailing. The back windshield was tinted, a small Rebel flag decal on its lower left corner. One brake light was broken and dangled by wires above the peeling chrome bumper. The car accelerated around the curve before he could read the muddied tag number, but its orange, green, and white color scheme indicated Tennessee plates.

  The car careened up the valley, pistons whining in rage, moving much too fast for the winding road. The backfire echoed off the hills, fading as the car negotiated deeper into the country until it disappeared from hearing. In the sudden silence, Jacob felt the pounding of his pulse against his eardrums. Other sounds filled the void—birds in the forest, a small airplane lost against the sky, a distant dog barking in territorial defense.

  Jacob crouched, limp from terror. A chill enveloped him. He pulled his jacket more tightly around him and stared at the road ahead, then back. He didn’t know where he was. How had he gotten out here on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere?

  Not again.

  He hadn’t experienced a fugue state since his teens, when Joshua was playing his cruel tricks. The fugues were a protective mechanism, one of the shrinks had assured him. Nothing serious, certainly nothing that would put him in a rubber room. It was a reaction to extreme stress, that was all. Besides, that was long ago, and he didn’t black out anymore.

  Except, if you were suffering periods of forgetfulness, you wouldn’t remember, would you?

  Anything could have happened and you wouldn’t know it.

  A sound arose from the back side of the hill, the whisper of wheels on asphalt.

  Jacob expected the green Chevy to come screaming around the curve, headlights glittering like a murderer’s eyes, bumper bright in the sun. He had no strength to flee. He would only be able to stand and watch as its front grill loomed closer and then chewed him into its chrome jaws.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to pray. But prayer was a ritual, a practiced art, not an escape hatch for the lapsed and faithless. The whisper grew louder, but without the accompanying growl of an overdriven engine. It wasn’t the Chevy.

  He blinked as the pickup drove past. The vehicle slowed then backed up until it idled in the lane across from him. The driver’s-side window descended, but even before Jacob recognized the dark, tousled head topped with its ever-present gray wool toboggan, he read the logo on the door: Smalley Construction.

  Chick Smalley blew a frayed rope of cigarette smoke into the air, then said, “Mr. Wells, what you doing out in these parts? You break down or something?”

  Smalley had done some subcontracting work for M & W Ventures. He had plumbing and electrical licenses and could also do drywall or roofing when sober. He never missed a deadline but neither did he miss a chance to fly fish when the mood struck him. He never lied about his preferences. If the fish were biting, he’d call the boss and tell him to go to hell for the morning. He’d work three times as hard in the afternoon to make it up, and that reputation kept him busy enough to make all the living he seemed to desire.

  “Hi, Chick,” Jacob said. He put his hands in his pockets so that Smalley wouldn’t see them trembling. “Did you pass a car a minute ago, a junker Chevy with tinted windows?”

  “Nope,” Smalley said, looking in the ditch ahead as if expecting to see Jacob’s wrecked vehicle. “You get runned off the road? Flat tire?”

  “I was just—” Just what the hell was he doing out here? He couldn’t explain the encounter with the Chevy and was afraid he’d sound like a lunatic if he tried. Already he doubted if the incident had even happened. But there were the skid marks, twin black snakes crawling away from him on the surface of the road.

  “You’re looking rough, Mr. Wells. You need a ride back to town?”

  A car came around the curve, another behind it. Traffic had returned to normal. Whatever strange spell had descended upon the valley had lifted. Jacob felt foolish standing on the side of the road and he’d lost his appetite for directionless wandering. He hurried across the lane and climbed into the passenger side of the pickup.

  Smalley put the truck in gear. “Just dump that stuff in the floor,” he said, grinding out his cigarette and accelerating. Jacob pushed rags, a tape measure, a vial of plumber’s putty, a caulking gun, and some ragged outdoors magazines aside to make room, then clutched the dashboard in a spasm of dizziness. It must have been the tobacco smoke, a reminder of his recent tragedy. Smoke would forever bring a longing ache, and fire would always take him back to that hellish night.

  “Shit, Mr. Wells, you look white as a Confederate ghost. Want me to take you to the hospital?”

  “No,” Jacob yelled, more forcefully than he’d intended. “Take me ho—”

  He had no home. The knowledge hit him like God’s fist. He looked out the window at the trees blurring past, the varying shades of green as the vegetation juiced itself in preparation for summer. This was a hostile planet, a land of pain and strangeness. You could buy pieces of it, hold up deeds and titles, but in the end all you had was the dirt above you, the dirt that busted through your coffin and filled your mouth and lungs. In the end, you didn’t own the land, it owned you, it sucked you under and crushed you and hugged you and smothered you with affection, its worms kissing you into slumber, its weight greater than the tonnage of guilt and fear and rage that you carried in your living flesh.

  “Do you know where Ivy Terrace is?” he finally asked.

  “Them apartments you built up on the west side?” Smalley peered at him as if deciding whether to go to the hospital after all.

  “Yeah. Can you take me there?” He reached for his back pocket. “I’ll pay you, of course.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. Work is work and favors is favors. Remember that next time somebody else needs a hand.”

  Jacob glanced in the side mirror, and for a moment thought he saw the green Chevy roaring up from behind. He wiped at his eyes.

  “I heard about what happened,” Smalley said, keeping his eyes on the road as the clusters of neighboring houses grew denser. Jacob hadn’t realized how far he had walked. The sun had already started its downward slide toward afternoon.

  “Hard to figure the ways of the Lord sometimes,” Smalley said. He reached to a stained and frayed work coat beside him and pushed it across the seat toward Jacob. “The way I figure, He did plenty of suffering up on the cross, so we all get to do a little in our turn.”

  Jacob looked out the window, thinking of Mattie, remembering the way she had sat on his foot as a toddler and urg
ed him to make it “giddy-up.” What did Smalley know about suffering? He didn’t have a family, or any responsibility. He had a fly rod in his shotgun rack and a truck bed full of scrap lumber and rusty tools. He had a nicotine habit and dirty nails.

  Smalley fumbled in the folds of the coat, opening it so that Jacob could see the bottle. The amber liquid lay greasy and thick within the confines of the glass, rolling back and forth in waves with the motion of the truck. “But the Lord gave us means to ease our suffering. That’s a real blessing, you ask me.”

  Jacob looked at the bottle, the slick brass cap, the brown label that suggested an easy afternoon on the plantation. He pictured himself showing up on Renee’s doorstep half-drunk, an excuse to launch into an abusive rage.

  No, not half. Jacob hadn’t been half-drunk in over a decade.

  “No, thanks,” he said, more to himself than Smalley.

  “Suit yourself. Say, you got any work coming up?”

  Jacob didn’t want to tell the man that M & W Ventures was done. Renee should be the first to know, followed by his partner. Maybe Donald would buy him out and keep the earth machines well fed, continue stacking bricks and laying pavement and raising monuments to progress and ego. Taking up the Wells mantle without benefit of the bloodline. “I’ve been out of touch,” he said.

  “Yeah. I reckon so.”

  They circled the back end of town, past the gray warehouses and boarded-up shops that lined the abandoned railroad. Jacob used to think of this section as a slum, acres and acres in need of a wrecking ball, an urban renewal project he had once calculated as a long-term investment. Turn the old textile mill into a mini-mall, charge outrageous rent for small shops whose proprietors could peddle “handcrafted” Appalachian baskets and quilts that were actually mass-produced by exploited labor in Taiwan. The consumer was only buying an emotion, after all. A mountain town back-street offered plenty of nostalgia for those who longed for better days that had never really existed.